The word _rites_ is the very word most fitting the Lady's lips--used in a generous, free, capacious sense--as of the solace entire which the wife of a soldier has, following him; as to dress his wounds, wind his laurel, hear his counsels, cheer his darker mood, smile away the lowering of the Elements-- SEWARD. You won't understand me. NORTH. No--no--no. It won't go down. I have opened my mouth far and wide, and, it won't go down. Our friend Isaac Widethroat himself could not bolt it. The moral impossibility would choke him--that Othello would marry Desdemona to leave her at her Father's House, for which most perilous and entangling proceeding, quite out of his character, no motive is offered, or imaginable. The love-making might go on long--and I accept a good interval since he drew from her the prayer for his history. The pressure of the war might give a decisive moment for the final step, which must have been in agitation for some time--on Desdemona's behalf and part, who would require some persuasion for a step so desperate, and would not at once give up all hope of her, father's consent, who "loved" Othello. TALBOYS. If they were married, how base and unmanly _to steal one's wedded Wife out of one's Father-in-law's house_! The only course was to have gone in the middle of the day to Brabantio and say, "this we have done"--or "this I have done. Forgive us, if you can--we are Man and Wife." Men less kingly than Othello have often done it. To steal in order to marry was a temptation with a circumstantial necessity--a gallant adventure in usual estimation. NORTH. The thing most preposterous to me in a long marriage at Venice, is the continued lying position in which it places Othello and Desdemona towards her father. Two months--say--or three or four--of difficult deception! when the uppermost characteristic of both is clear-souledness--the most magnanimous sincerity. By that, before anything else, are they kindred and fit for one another. On that, before anything else, is the Tragedy grounded--on his unsuspicious openness which is drawn, against its own nature, to suspect her purity that lies open as earth's bosom to the sun. And she is to be killed for a dissembler! In either, immense contrast between the person and fate. That These Two should truckle to a domestic lie! TALBOYS. No. The Abduction and Marriage were of one stroke--one effort--one plot. When Othello says, "That I have ta'en away--that I have married her"--he tells literally and simply that which has happened as it happened, in the order of events. SEWARD. Why should not Othello marry Desdemona, and keep her at her father's, as theorised? NORTH.